Serious question, what’s the principle in play here? I have friends who moved to Europe and have no plans of returning, but they vote in every US election.
Because I vote in Israeli elections. Nobody should be allowed to vote for two countries, especially as there are so many people in the world who don’t get to vote at all. It doesn’t seem right.
Your premises have nothing to do with your conclusion: one’s right to vote in the US is in no way predicated on recognition of citizenship in any other country. Had Leo been a citizen of the unrecognized (to the US) Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic instead of the Vatican, that wouldn’t have had any bearing on his eligibility to vote in the US midterms.
I mean, I don’t think that’s necessarily an intrinsically bad principle, but surely the place to apply it is in disallowing dual citizenship in the first place, not forbidding dual citizens to vote in whichever of their two countries they don’t reside in.
If we’re going to say that everybody should have to pick only one country where they count as a citizen and have the rights of a citizen, okay, let’s do that, and make dual citizenship illegal. But if dual citizenship is legal, then I don’t think it’s moral to advocate for stripping (or even self-stripping) individual dual citizens of any of the rights to which they are legally entitled in either/any of their countries.
(Which raises the question: why do you even remain a US citizen if you feel that your commitment to the citizenship of a different country precludes your exercising your rights as a US citizen? If you’re paying US taxes, maintaining a US passport, etc., then you’re part of the US citizen population even if you reside overseas. If you don’t think it’s fair for you to vote in two countries because so many people are deprived of voting rights entirely, then why do you think it’s fair to, say, have the privilege of deciding which of the two countries you’ll eventually retire in with citizenship rights? Dual citizenship is indeed an extremely privileged and elite status, on a global scale of comparison, which offers freedoms and choices that most humans can’t even dream of. Refraining from voting in one of your countries of citizenship really isn’t doing anything to redress that imbalance.)
Convenience, mostly. I don’t want to do the whole visa song-and-dance on the rare occasion I travel to the States - and besides, I’m afraid they might refuse a visa to someone who’s renounced their US citizenship.
Besides, just because I choose not to exercise a privilege, that doesn’t mean I want that choice taken away from me. I’m not stupid. After all, I might change my mind.
It wasn’t just the Electors of Hanover. Three of the five other secular Electors (Bohemia, Saxony and Brandenburg) also ruled kingdoms outside the Empire at various points during the eighteenth century.
That seems like a very reasonable pragmatic approach that I don’t think you should be legally prevented from exercising. Just like I don’t think other dual citizens should be legally prevented from exercising the voting rights that you personally prefer not to exercise.
There are plenty of good reasons for different people to make different choices about their actions as dual citizens. But I think you’re going a bit too far with the “nobody should be allowed to” absolutism about denying to everybody the particular set of non-resident citizen rights that you happen not to care about.
On thinking about it, every pope is from somewhere. Some of those places might have stripped their citizenship or otherwise prevented them from voting after they became Pope, but I doubt they all did. Has any previous pope been eligible to vote in their home country’s elections after their ascension, and if so, did any?
I believe that most previous popes were Italian. (Although how long have ordinary citizens been allowed to vote in democratic elections?)
I have no intention of returning to the USA, but (1) I might be wrong about that and (2) a large number of friends and relatives do still live there, and (3) if I can make the world better, or stop the world from getting worse, by something as simple as voting, why wouldn’t I?
My husband voted against Brexit from abroad, so it’s certainly not true that all voting ex-pats are Brexit supporters.
One answer to this is that it’s unusually difficult to renounce US citizenship, and is considerably more costly and inconvenient than not doing so. I would renounce tomorrow if it were straightforward, but it takes thousands of dollars and also potentially compromises your ability to visit or transit through the US.
We’re getting far from this thread’s topic, but “make dual citizenship illegal” is functionally impossible, because you get to choose which country you want to belong to AND each country gets to decide who they count as a citizen, and you and the country may not agree.
For example, to renounce Iranian citizenship requires the explicit formal approval of the Iranian Council of Ministers. They may grant it, they may not, and if they don’t, you are still counted as one of theirs even if you don’t want that citizenship. In Greece, males must generally complete national service before a renunciation will be considered; Argentina does not allow you to renounce your citizenship, period, end of discussion.
He wouldn’t have been eligible. The law is quite clear. A US citizen residing anywhere in the world is eligible to vote for federal offices (Pres, Senator, Representative) forever at the address of their last US residence. In my case, that’s Champaign, IL. A temporary non-resident of IL is allowed to vote for state and local offices, but that may not be true in every state.
I see no reason the Pope should not have voted. And if Netanyahoo is indeed a US citizen, I see no reason he couldn’t vote.
I’m not sure I understand. The pope was eligible to vote in federal, state, and local elections. He is an Illinois resident that is living overseas.
Wikipedia says he hasn’t actually lived in the US since 2014 (lucky stiff), but his last address was in Chicago. So if Hari is correct about Illinois law, he should be able to vote for School Board. (I was just making a snarky joke and have no idea what the law is)
Depends who he voted for.
Sorry, I knew you were kidding. I thought it was funny in another way too – that an Illinois school board election (along with IL congress) is likely more critical than rest of the ballot.
I think @Hari_Seldon’s understanding is incomplete though. My understanding is that if you have an Illinois residence, then you can continue to vote in state and local elections in Illinois – even if you have permanently moved out of the country. The pope has a residence in New Lennox, IL and has been voting for decades from Peru. I don’t think there is a ballot or a mechanism to be able to just vote in federal elections.
OK, I just looked it up. The law in Illinois is that if you say you intend to move back to Illinois at some time in the future, you can vote in every race. Otherwise, you can only vote for Federal offices. So presumably the Pope does not have a vote for School Board.
But, as I understand it, that was the case. If you were a British citizen and lived abroad for more than 15 years, you were stripped of the right to vote in the UK.
A British colleague of mine at the European Patent Office here in The Hague would have wanted to vote in the Brexit Referendum (her intention would have been to vote “Remain”), but she could not do so because she had been living in the Netherlands for more than 15 years.
Apparently that was changed in 2024, and now you have to register to vote every 3 years in order to preserve your right to vote.
I imagine that in the 2016 referendum quite a few expats (both for and against Brexit) were affected by the “15 year rule”.
Link with information about the current rules:
Given that the changes to spouse visas has effectively prevented some people from returning to the UK with their families- it can be very hard to meet the income/savings requirements, especially if you don’t already live in the country- further stripping people of their vote and so any right to a say regarding said laws seems decidedly unfair to me.
Incidentally, estimates from polls of British citizens living overseas who were not allowed to vote in the Brexit referendum due to the 15 year rule suggest that if they had been allowed to vote, they would have voted remain at a far higher proportion than UK residents. There’s even been projections that if overseas citizens barred from voting in the referendum had voted with a reasonable turnout, it may have been enough to change the result to remain.
Benedict XVI established that he’s free to retire if he chooses to. Maybe he’s got an old place in Hyde Park he’d like to go back to.